1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a system and method for controlling the dispensing of pharmaceutical and other medically related items. More particularly, the invention relates to a system which is particularly useful for verifying the accuracy of medicines and other items which are to be delivered from a hospital pharmacy to patients in the hospital.
2. Background Information
The dispensing of the proper medications to patients within a hospital is a very important aspect of heath care delivery. For several decades, rolling carts have been used to transport medications from a hospital's pharmacy to hospital patients. These carts have multiple drawers each assigned to an individual patient so that a given patient's medications are disposed in a single drawer within one of the carts. As a practical matter, there are two sets of drawers one of which is generally kept at a nurses station in the hospital and the other of which is generally kept within the pharmacy to be refilled in preparation for dispensing the next day's medications. In short, a technician picks or pulls the pertinent medications for given patients in accordance with a patient-specific list of medications and places them in the patient drawers of the pharmacy carts, which are taken to the nurses station where the drawers of the pharmacy cart are exchanged with those of the nurses cart in preparation for subsequent delivery to hospital patients. The carts thus allow for prescriptions to be filled at the centralized location represented by the pharmacy and transported to decentralized locations such as nurses' stations and patient rooms. A pharmacist verifies that the medications within each drawer are the proper medications.
Dispensing cabinets are also commonly used in the medication delivery system, including automated dispensing cabinets (commonly known as ADCs) which are configured to help control the proper dispensing and tracking of medications. Dispensing cabinets are typically positioned at or near a nurses station and may, like the carts noted above, be configured for transport between the centralized pharmacy and decentralized nurses station for stocking and dispensing, respectively. Such dispensing cabinets have various configurations, but typically include a number of drawers each of which are divided into or contain numerous compartments each of which serves to hold a specific medication in bulk. These compartments may or may not be removable from the drawer. Some of these compartments are configured as open top containers while others include lids which may be opened and closed. One example of such a compartment having a lid is disclosed in U.S. Application Publication 2006/0226167 of Broadfield et al., wherein the lidded compartment is commonly referred to as a “cubie”. The number of such compartments within a drawer may easily be 20, 30, 40 or more. These compartments are stocked or re-stocked respectively in accordance with an initial stocking order or re-stocking order which is typically created by a pharmacist or a company which manufactures or sells the dispensing cabinet. As with the patient drawers discussed above, a pharmacist will verify that the proper medications are used to fill these compartments during the stocking or re-stocking process. Although this process of verifying that the proper medications reach a patient's drawer or the compartments of a dispensing cabinet is important, it is also very time consuming.
While there have been a variety of improvements in the verification systems for these medications, there is still a need in the art to provide a more reliable verification system.